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pianoloverus
Yikes! 10000 Post Club Member
Registered: 05/29/01
Posts: 21718
Loc: New York City

I think my biggest concern is the rhythm/tempo.

There are numerous tempo fluctuations that to me appear for no particularly good reason. I think several of the 16th notes are played more like 32nd notes. I'd recommend practicing the piece with a metronome and after being able to play it perfectly in time adding carefully thought out rubato.

Glen, I'm with pianoloverus on this one -- the arbitrary changes in tempo and imprecisiona between 32nd and 16th notes are just too bothersome to me. This isn't jazz, and too much rubato in this piece IMO actually diminishes the poignancy of expression rather than enhancing it. While I do hear a good deal of sensitivity to the emotional implications in your rendition, I would agree with pv -- concentrate on playing this piece rhythmically "straight", allowing perhaps a little broadening at the climactic point. Also, I would look for any opportunity to make the repeated section slightly different than the first. In general, I tend to be a curmudgeon on this -- in theme and variationa or whatever, I never like hearing the repeats presently EXACTLY the same way.

One of my struggles you easily identified is what tends to happen when I get wrapped up in the sound of that piano and the emotion of a melody i want express more strongly --- any sense of strict time starts to get dicey, specially in those sections.

When I hold a strict sense of time, the emotion of the piece goes pretty far south and it starts to sound too metronomic. There's a great deal going on with this one-pager and I went with the take that seemed to capture my expressing the mood and sound, clearly sacrificing the critical details you found very distracting. Bad habits are hard to break, for sure...

I very much appreciate the feedback and when I can resume any kind of practice at all, I will hold more strongly to varying the repeats, and even more strongly adhering to a much more well-defined tempo, or what i perceive as a pulse with this gem.